Google Goes To Space

It seems that Google would like to do for space what it has done for maps. Who does a company turn to as a partner when it wants to make all manner of space information available to the general public? NASA, of course.

The Financial Times (and many other media outlets) have reported that, "Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley on Monday announced a “Space Act Agreement” with Google that would include collaboration on large-scale data management and massively distributed computing as well as focusing on making the most useful of Nasa’s information available over the Internet."

What kind of information would be available? Only the coolest stuff in the world (said she, a life-long science fiction geek). There are apparently plans afoot for, among things, real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars and real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle.